Ultimate Thriller Box Set - Crouch Blake (лучшие книги без регистрации txt) 📗

Lauren figured her only way out was to either kill them, or run away. She chose to run, because she wasn’t about to throw away her life for those two shitheads.

I had a hard time believing the entire hard luck story. To me, the only part that rang true was the drug stuff, because it connected her to Arlo Pelz, whom I’d just learned from Jolene was a seller and a user.

I was very pleased with myself. Through shrewd and dogged detective work, I’d just landed a big clue about where Lauren and Arlo’s lives intersected. What I didn’t know yet was exactly how. The story Mrs. Harper was telling me certainly wasn’t blackmail material, at least not that version. Lauren had risen from a tragic childhood and bettered herself.

Hell, if that story had come out, it would probably have raised Lauren’s stature among her fundraising-for-charity social set.

No, the truth had to be something much worse. Maybe Lauren wasn’t as clean and wholesome as she’d portrayed herself to the Harpers. What if she’d been an addict and a whore, and Arlo knew it? Worse, what if Arlo could prove it? That might have been something so shameful that Lauren couldn’t live with it.

That theory worked, except for one thing. It didn’t explain how Cyril Parkus knew who Arlo was, or if he didn’t exactly know Arlo, how he recognized his face.

While I was mulling the possibilities, Mrs. Harper went on with her story. I have to confess I was only half-listening at that point, and probably missed some important details.

The upshot was that the Harpers virtually adopted Lauren. They hired a new maid and Lauren was promoted to surrogate daughter. Somehow, Mr. Harper pulled off some legal magic and enrolled her in the local high school under their name. They told their friends she was a “tragically orphaned” niece they’d adopted. I don’t know what lie they told their family, but whatever it was, it worked. No one questioned anything then and hadn’t since.

“She blossomed in school,” Mrs. Harper said. “She made us so proud. Straight As.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said, eager to go now that I’d found what I needed. There was just one, last thing. “Did she ever mention Arlo Pelz?”

“No,” she replied.

I showed her a picture of Arlo, a close-up I took that day on the pier.

“Ever seen him before?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Who is he?”

“A drug dealer.”

“Haven’t you been listening?” Mrs. Harper stood up, clearly angry. “Lauren escaped from that world. From the day she stepped into our home, that life ended and her new one began.”

“Apparently not,” I replied.

Mrs. Harper marched over to the wall of family photos and pointed at one of them. “Here she is getting the honor roll. Here she is on the swim team. The debate team. The school newspaper.”

She pointed at photo after photo to prove her point. “Does this look like a woman who has anything to do with drugs?”

I looked at the picture. Six teenage girls standing around a printing press, their aprons covered with ink. Not one of them was Lauren.

In fact, Lauren wasn’t in a single one of the photos on that wall. I turned to Mrs. Harper and studied her. This crazy woman had created an entirely false, perfect world and inserted her vision of Lauren into it. She’d even gone so far as to put up fake childhood photos on the wall. I could only imagine what Lauren’s teenage years had really been like.

“Mrs. Harper, I don’t know who that girl is, but she isn’t Lauren,” I said. “Why don’t we start over, with the real story?”

Mrs. Harper looked at the photo, then back at me, then started to speak again, stammering, talking so fast, the words tripped over themselves. “Oh, no! You’ve got it wrong. You didn’t know. This is her. This is Lauren. It’s her before.”

“Before?”

She grabbed my arm and dragged me over to another photo, of herself, a man I presumed was Mr. Harper, and a teenage girl, taken in front of an old Ford Mustang. I looked into the girl’s eyes and I shivered.

“This is a picture of us, a few weeks after Lauren graduated from high school,” she said. “Brock bought that car for her as a graduation gift, but it was really more for himself. He’d always wanted a sports car.”

She sat down on the couch again. I stayed where I was, looking at the photo again. The same girl was in all of them. I’d never see her before. But I knew her.

“Brock used any excuse to drive that damn car. He was always going on a quick trip to the grocery store for things we didn’t really need and asking Lauren if he could borrow her car. Lauren always went with him,” Mrs. Harper wiped away fresh tears and struggled to continue. “The police say he was driving fifteen miles over the speed limit when a station wagon pulled out in front of him. He swerved, lost control of the car. It rolled over a dozen times. Brock was killed. Lauren was thrown clear, but she broke her arm, her ribs, and smashed up her face pretty bad.”

I stared at the family portrait. Lauren’s eyes stared back at me from another person’s face, the girl in all those photos.

I took out my picture of Lauren and held it beside the framed photo. It was the same person, only one of them was wearing a mask. I looked Lauren’s picture, her face finally revealing its meaning to me.

No wonder I thought Lauren’s beauty looked sculpted. No wonder Carol looked at the pictures and saw a woman who’d had a lot of work done.

We both saw through one of Lauren’s secrets and blew it off. How many other secrets had been revealed to me that I’d ignored?

Suddenly, a strange thought occurred to me.

My hand started to shake. To hide it, I put my picture of Lauren back in my pocket and left my hand there.

“Mrs. Harper,” I asked, hearing a tremble in my voice, “You wouldn’t happen to remember which high school Lauren went to?”

“Of course I do,” she said. “Marcus Whitman.”

The same school Jolene went to. The school that had a reunion the day Arlo suddenly disappeared.

People, places, and events were colliding in ways I could never have imagined and had an even harder time trying to understand. But all I could do was my part, to connect the obvious dots as they appeared, even if I couldn’t see the shape I was creating.

“Do you know if Lauren ever went to one of their reunions?” I asked.

“She got an invitation, but wasn’t able to make it,” Mrs. Harper said. “Since she wasn’t going to attend, the reunion people asked me for a recent picture of Lauren and some news about her life to put in a newsletter they were going to give out at the party.”

“Did you give them a picture?”

“No, that wouldn’t have been right. I just told them how well she’d done, and how she’d raised so much money for charity in Los Angeles,” she replied. “What does this have to do with Lauren’s suicide?”

Everything—I just didn’t know how yet. A few more questions might have helped me, but I didn’t get a chance to ask.

The phone rang.

I immediately headed for the door. “I better be going now, Mrs. Harper; you’ve been a tremendous help.”

“Wait, that could be Cyril,” she said, rising from the couch.

“Tell him I’m on the case.”

I was out the door and running down the hall by the time she answered the phone.

Chapter Seventeen

I went to dinner at a Home Town Buffet off the freeway between Seattle and Snohomish. I piled my plate high with fried chicken, macaroni, chow mein, tater tots, and corn on the cob and took it back to my booth.

While I ate, I looked at the people around me. They all looked suspicious. They all looked like people with secrets.

And when they looked at me, they probably thought I was one of them. Just another average person trying to eat as much as he could for six dollars and ninety-nine cents.

They didn’t know that I was a private detective. They didn’t know it was my job to see through them, to find out what they didn’t want anyone else to discover.